Confusion on Iran and nukes

I don’t have information or analysis on this amazing story, I just have puzzles, contradictions, and questions. Here are some of them:

• How can there be, as the National Intelligence Estimate now tells us, nuclear enrichment programs in Iran that are NOT weapons-related? The purpose of nuclear enrichment is to produce enough of the fissionable form of Uranium, U-235, to produce an explosion, right? What other purpose does U-235 serve?

• The New York Sun in its lead editorial today says that the NIE report is just another in a long line of hit jobs by the U.S. intelligence establishment aimed at the Bush administration. The Sun basically says the report is a political lie, and that, notwithstanding the report, the Iranians are continuing to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. But just before reading the Sun editorial, I saw President Bush giving a press conference this morning in which he accepted as definitive the NIE’s statement that the Iranians had stopped the enrichment program in 2003. Bush’s insisted that Iran is still dangerous, because it may resume its enrichment program at any time, but he also said clearly that the previous belief that the Iranians were still pursuing enrichment after 2003 was incorrect.

• Did the Iranian program consist of actual uranium enrichment, or, in Bush’s words (this is a close paraphrase), of “efforts to learn how to enrich uranium”? There’s quite a difference between the two.

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Ken Hechtman points out something I should have known about nuclear fuel but forgot. He writes:

I can answer your first question. Naturally-occurring uranium ore is less than one percent U-235. Before it can be used as reactor fuel it needs to be enriched to between three and five percent U-235. Bomb-grade uranium is at least 90 percent U-235. Bomb-grade uranium is sometimes called “highly enriched” to distinguish it from “enriched” fuel-grade uranium.

The anti-war talking points focus on this distinction: Iran has every right under the Non-Proliferation Treaty to produce fuel-grade uranium and nobody has proved they’re doing anything more than that.

Another reader writes:

Naturally occuring uranium ore does not have enough U-235 even for power plant use. So enrichment must be done no matter what purpose you have in mind. The amount of enrichment needed for power reactors is less than that needed for weapons, but the same process is used to produce both. The material for weapons has been through the cycle many more times than the uranium for power plants.

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Steve Sailer, no friend of President Bush’s foreign policy, cites Gregory Cochran, also no friend of President Bush’s foreign policy, agreeing with the view that has also been expressed by the New York Sun and Norman Podhoretz that the NIE report, which represents the consensus of all U.S. intelligence agencies, is political, designed to prevent Bush from launching war on Iran during the remaining year of his presidency.

As for Norman Podhoretz, his blog entry at Contentions (the Commentary blog), posted at 5:50 p.m. yesterday, seems to be the source of the New York Sun’s view of the matter. Podhoretz’s quotations of the NIE past and present are instructive. The NIE’s repeated statement that its authors have “high confidence” in conclusions that are the 180 degree opposite of conclusions they reached with “high confidence” 30 months ago surely makes the whole enterprise sound extremely fishy. Further, it passes belief that during the very period when when the Iranian leaders have been boasting of their coming nuclear weapons capability, they would have stopped their effort to develop nuclear weapons. Maybe Bush feels the same, but can’t say so because it would make him look weak. So he solves the dilemma by pretending to agree wholeheartedly with the NIE finding, while, inconsistently, continuing to insist that Iran is as big a threat as ever.

For the full draft of the mainstream conservative disbelief in the NIE report, see the discussion at Lucianne.com (only online for a couple of days).

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 04, 2007 12:41 PM | Send